Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond

by Robert F. Curtis

  This crew had a third pilot and his name is there, too. He is there because he did something stupid. He might have gotten his name there in his own right, had he lasted longer, but instead he is there with the crew of that Chinook, even though his name was not on the flight schedule that day.

  * * *

  During Operation Lam Son 719, the invasion of Laos, so many helicopters were going down—107 destroyed and NHH damaged in six weeks—that orders from Division Headquarters directed that only aircrews on an assigned mission were to cross the border. Like I said, he wasn’t supposed to fly that day. He was one of the few pilots who did not share his hootch with anyone, so he did not have a roommate to report him missing. For that matter, no one even knew he died or was missing from the company area until the day after the helicopter was shot down and he did not show up for a scheduled morning launch. We started looking for him and finally, one of the maintenance crew remembered seeing him board the downed aircraft, camera in hand, as it taxied out for that day’s missions. He must have gone to take pictures, as pilots sometimes do. He probably wanted some shots of the Ho Chi Min trail. Hard to take them when you are flying and besides, you get better camera angles from the back than from the cockpit.

  * * *

  I remember being 19, like he was when the Chinook blew up, and I remember knowing for a fact that death only happened to other people. He had no wife and was a “Newbie” so no one really knew him well or knew anything about his family. Do they still keep a picture of him on the wall or mantle, his new silver wings bright against the green of his dress uniform?

  The flight engineer, the senior enlisted man on board, had shared many flights with me. He was a dark haired young man, good natured, always covered in grease, and apparently not afraid of anything. Well, he never admitted or showed signs of being afraid, anyway. I don’t remember whether or not he was married. After 17 years, the details have dimmed considerably and the pictures he had taped to the armor inside his aircraft are vague now. What had not faded was the pride he took in his aircraft, something that made the pilots always glad to fly his Chinook.

  The other two were also young, caught up in the war like the rest of us. the crew chief was blond and friendly, as he looked at the world through thick glasses. He was really looking forward to the day when he would be flight engineer of his own Chinook and could paint the pictures he wanted on the side of the aircraft up by the crew door on the starboard side. The door gunner wasn’t a grunt that got tired of walking and volunteered to fly, like many of the door gunners were. He was a crew chief, too. He just volunteered to be door gunner when his aircraft was in for maintenance or not on the flight schedule. He too wanted his own Chinook, had one picked out in fact, but until then he enjoyed the view from over the M-60D’s barrel as we flew along.

  As I touched the third pilot’s name, I couldn’t help but say out loud, “You dumb-ass.” The others died doing their jobs but this one died because he was 19 and invulnerable. Then I nearly cried.

  You see, it was a beautiful, warm, late-summer day. The young girls in their summer dresses and shorts were walking on the Mall, many of them, the age that our wives and girlfriends were then and the age our daughters are now—my son’s age now.

  Women my age were at the Wall, too, but I tried not to look at them, afraid of what I might see. My wife might have been one of them, if the North Vietnamese gunner that hit me and took my Chinook out of the sky had pulled the trigger a half-second sooner.

  My throat was dry and my eyes were blurry as I started to leave. As I turned from the Wall to go, I saw two of those lovely young girls standing behind me. Standing near together, they might have been sisters, tan with blond streaky hair. Both of them stared at me, looking half way between shock and pity, or maybe just in surprise that men really did get the way I was when they visited the Wall on a late-summer’s day. Were they children of the wall, daughters of names on the polished black stone or only tourists, looking at dusty history? Maybe either or both, I don’t know.

  By the time I passed the Washington Monument on my way back up the hill, I was under control again. Pilots, aviators, especially Marine aviators, must always be under control—death before uncool.

  When I visited the Wall that day, I was nearly 40, and learning to be a military bureaucrat in Washington. My friends on the wall are still in their late teens and twenties. They still live in my mind, just like they were in 1971.

  The day they died, we packed all their things, took down their plaques from the wall of the Playtex Officer’s Club, erased their names from the aircrew boards in the Club and in Operations, and then we went back to flying. The day after they died, a stranger entering the company area and walking around would never have known they had ever been there.

  But their names are there on the Wall. For those of us still here, one by one, our flying days have ended, and our war is history, like Korea and WWII were to us back in 1971. Maybe someday I’ll go visit my friends again, but not too soon. Not on a warm, sunny, late-summer’s day when the young girls walk the Mall in their summer clothes.

  REEFING

  * * *

  There comes a time when you cannot do it anymore. That is, you cannot do it at the level that is required to be fully successful as an aviator. Anything less than full concentration is simply death for you, and perhaps for your passengers, too. Perhaps the closest way to explain it is by asking the question, “when do you reef a sailboat’s sails,” i.e. make them smaller, reducing speed but keeping the boat from being over-powered, capsized or smashed by the wind? The wind is rising, what to do? Reef now or wait, thinking things will get better and the wind will drop? Answer—the first time reefing crosses your mind, do it, do it right then. If you wait until after that moment, it may be too late to reef and the boat may go down under too much sail, the mast shattered and the sails shredded. And when you start thinking of dead guys instead of closing the door when you enter the mental room marked “flying,” it is time to reef.

  * * *

  I thought about it again as I sat at my desk. Well, not really a desk, since only the senior officers and senior civil servants at Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) have a real desk in a room with a door, but more of a shelf in a cubical. While I was going through my training to become a bureaucrat, another friend and his entire crew died in a helicopter crash. That was three years ago but I sat there in my cube and counted to myself all the men I knew who had died when their aircraft crashed. I started after Vietnam. Why count those who died in war when there are so many more out there to start with?

  I quit counting at 43. that is not forty-three men killed in a single crash, but one here, two there, a crew of four there, over the seventeen years that had passed after I left Phu Bai. Five, when a Chinook loaded with 29 passengers flew into a mountain in Vietnam’s I Corps. An OH-58 crashes somewhere in Germany and one of my former roommates from Vietnam dies in it. One when his Chinook comes apart after a single-point failure at Fort Carson. Three, when their Frog came apart in flight over the Joshua Tree National Monument. One, when his 46 rolled over on the deck of an LPH and sank into the Pacific taking him with it. One, when his t-28 left a smoking black hole in the Florida sand before he even finished flight school. Two, when their Cobra hit a power line in Greece at 150 knots. One, when his Cobra went into the Intercostal Waterway for no reason anyone could fathom. Another when his 53 did not return from a mission and they found the wreckage in too many pieces to determine why it went in. On and on and on. And each time, we would go to the chapel and sing the hymn about God watching over those who fly, but it seems He often doesn’t….

  That one in October 1988 took two friends, one a crew chief—a good man, competent and a fine Marine—the other a close pilot friend from Med cruises past who I had taught tactics and all the hard things that make you a better combat pilot and flight instructor. Fun guy, but easy to make fun of in his middle-west, un-hip manner and everyone did, not that he seemed to mind.

 
I trained my friend to be a Weapons Tactics Instructor, a WTI, then the highest designation in Marine Corps helicopter aviation. He was a good student and learned well. Not to say that his training wasn’t exciting, it always is when you push yourself and your aircraft as far as they can go. But, you can be a good student, have a good well-maintained aircraft, have the best training you can get and enjoy life in general, no matter how good a shape you keep yourself in, you still die.

  * * *

  While flying on NVGs back on one of my Med cruises across northern Morocco one nice, moonlit night, we almost died, he and I and the crew chief in the back of our LN. It would have been one of those crashes where the aircrew flies directly into a mountain with no evasive action taken, one of those crashes like the Playtex Chinook in I Corps Vietnam back in 1971. An accident that sometimes leaves accident boards shaking their heads but is no mystery to those of us who fly NVG a lot. The weather—excellent; the visibility—excellent. All that would have remained would have been just a black spot after the fuel had burned off on a mountainside with aluminum fragments in it and small bits of DNA that they would put in a full sized coffin. The flag would be folded and the shots fired, but the aluminum box they buried would have been nearly empty.

  I was the aircraft commander and the WTI. My friend was my student doing one of his final navigation flights before we moved into training tactics with the goggles. We planned a route out across the desert, total flight time, one hour from takeoff to landing. We would takeoff from the Moroccan airbase southeast of Tangiers where we conducting our exercise, fly a five-legged course out across the desert on NVG and return to the base. Simple. Because it was a navigation hop, and my friend was the student navigator, I would fly and he would navigate for the entire run.

  Takeoff was normal, climb out was normal. What a fine night! The moon was high already and the night was clear—no haze—and it felt good to be in the air. The blue lights in the cockpit under the goggles showed all the instruments nicely and our course was as plain as if we were flying in daylight. On the way out we did a little mild buzzing of a hilltop where a friend was camped as part of the exercise, nothing serious, but a low pass to let him know we were thinking of him. And to rub it in that we were flying and he was not.

  The third leg promised to be as uneventful as the first two. We were not flying low. In fact, we were about the same altitude as we would have been in the daytime, 500 feet or so above the ground. We made our turn from the second leg onto the third, and were tracking on course. In front of us, we could see quite clearly through the goggles a tall mountain, the one we had noted in our planning as 3,000 feet in height. We picked out a notch in the ridgeline on the top that we had marked on our map, and aimed just to the right of it as planned.

  We were watching the ridge, green and sparkly through the lenses of the goggles. The air was smooth. Everything was normal. The altimeter began dropping rapidly from radar 500 feet toward zero.

  Don’t think of the color blue. Couldn’t help yourself, could you? It’s the same when things change in an experienced, focused pilot’s cockpit. If you would be a pilot, you must, by definition, have excellent peripheral vision because you must see without looking directly at something. Over a short period of time, when you start flying, you learn to see movement. It gives you the ability to know something is changing without having to look directly at it. In the whole panel of 40 or more gauges in front of you, it just takes movement on only one and you instantly see it and your eyes go to it involuntarily. You cannot stop yourself from it, even if you tried.

  And the altimeter moved … Down, hard down and fast.

  We could see nothing in front of us, but the 200 feet low altitude warning light was on and then it was 125 feet and dropping and the cyclic stick was coming back in my right hand as the altimeter fell toward zero and impact with the ground. As the stick came back to my lap, the collective came up as I added all the power the aircraft had and at last the altimeter stopped falling. It bounced between 25 to 50 feet and then went “no-track,” meaning we were higher than the 200 feet low altitude warning setting, as we cleared the ground below us. The low altitude warning light went off. A few seconds later, I lowered the power and the nose and we went back to cruise flight, the big ridge still sparkly in the moonlight in front of us.

  We had come within 20 feet of flying into a ridge lower than the big one we were looking at. It was masked entirely in the shadow of the bigger ridge and we flew directly toward it without seeing it. Our fault. Had we planned properly, we would have known it was there and navigated accordingly. Our fault. My fault.

  But we didn’t die. No smoking hole in the hillside with bits of aluminum scattered about, no casualty assistance officers walking up to our houses with the news.

  I trained my friend as best as I could and he was a good student. In time, I left the squadron to go to Washington to become a bureaucrat, and a few months later he went to the Weapons Tactics Instructor course at Yuma. He did well, too, from what I heard later. As a goodbye present, I gave him one of my dark green Norwegian Army turtleneck shirts left over from my Royal Navy days to wear against the Arizona desert night cold. Military bureaucrats don’t need them, but Fleet Marine Corps pilots do.

  The end of the WTI course is a graduation exercise that is very complicated and difficult, all planned and executed by the students. In it, every part of Marine and other forces aviation must come together. By accounts I heard later, he did his part well and at the end of the night he dropped his final load of troops and lifted off for the return flight to MCAS Yuma. WTI course complete, and after good work and hard flying, he was ready to go home to MCAS New River to train his squadron in all he learned. As he climbed out from that final landing zone in the Arizona desert, a Huey flew into the side of his CH-46E and both crews, eight men in all, died as their aircraft came apart and fell in flaming pieces to the desert. His fault? The Huey pilot’s fault? My fault? The Marine Corps’ fault? I wonder if he had on the Norwegian Army shirt I gave him when he died.

  * * *

  In my mind they all stopped aging when they died. I may be 65 now, but they are all 28 or 32 or 20 still. they are not bald or fat and they are strong and confident when they laugh. Some drink too much, others not at all. They are married, they are single—either way it’s forever in my mind. Those of us still here wonder what they know now that we don’t. What’s over there on the other side of life? Heaven? Hell? Anything? Nothing? those of us here still cry, not necessarily for them—they knew the risk and took it anyway—but for what they missed; children growing up, baldness, spare tires, laughs over drinks about the good old days and because they now know something we do not.

  In the end it comes down to being able to build separate rooms and when you enter one, you close the door on the last one behind you. The room you just left has house payments, sick kids, worries about promotion or relationships. The room you just entered, the one with “Flight” on the door, has only flying there—no ghosts, no fear, no regrets for those that died. But for me there came a time when I could not close the door any more. Those on the other side kept it open a little and the lock was sprung.

  But in the years since I stopped military flying, they still die, the young men, some of them who are still my friends also die: a V-22 flown by a former student of mine goes into the Potomac off Quantico, another V-22 crashes in morocco, a Chinook goes into the water in the Philippines, another Chinook, hit by RPG rounds, goes down in Afghanistan, a Huey crashes in California, a medical helicopter crashes in Arizona, a Shitter hits the ground in Afghanistan, a missile takes out a Blackhawk, a Huey and Cobra mid-air just north of Yuma, but I am not there to know them now, and I cannot go back. Not even if I wanted to….

  My final flight as a military aviator was on June 18, 1988 in CH-46E, bureau number 156436. According to my log book, I flew 30 minutes with lieutenant colonel, later Lieutenant General John Castellaw, call sign “Glad.” I made one landing. I do not remember the fligh
t, so it must have been perfect.

  In 1992 I reefed. My missions were done. I am surprised to still be alive.

  GLOSSARY

  * * *

  AC Aircraft Commander (Army term)

  ADF Automatic Direction Finder

  AFB Air Force Base

  AFTP Authorized Flight training Period

  AGL Above Ground Level, i.e altitude above the surface of the Earth

  AH-1 Bell Cobra or Sea Cobra, Army and Marine Corps Attack Helicopter

  AHRS Attitude Heading Reference System

  AIM Airman’s Information Manual

  AMTRAK Amphibious Assault Vehicle used by the Marine Corps

  APC Armored Personnel Carrier

  APU Auxiliary Power Unit

  ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnam

  ASHB Assault Support Helicopter Battalion

  ASE Automatic Stability equipment

  ATC Air Traffic Control

  AWS Amphibious Warfare School

  Blackhawk Sikorsky-built US Army Utility Helicopter, UH-60

  BOQ Bachelor Officer’s Quarters

  BRC Base Recover Course

  C&C Command and Control

  CCA Carrier-Controlled Approach